Archive for Sarah Palin

Even in the aftermath of the horrendous mass murders in Arizona virtually all the talking heads in mainstream mass media, the cultural apparatus that shapes public opinion in modern societies, are refusing to call a spade a spade and tell it like it really is. It is as if everybody got together in some proverbial smoke filled room and agreed that whatever happened, nobody would tell the unvarnished truth about the causes of the massacre. Early the morning after, as most Americans were trying to digest the news listening in a mild state of shock and plenty confused, all the media commentators talked as if they were oblivious to the history of the last two years. And they vied with each other to declare the insignificance of what they do.

To listen to them tell it there is no possibility that this gun wielding mad man could have been driven to murder by the constant anti-government harangues emanating from the right-wing propaganda machine, with their gun fetishes and fear mongering. As evidence for their conclusion they are all desperately clinging to the argument that the gunman is just crazy! They passionately argue out that the rancid rhetoric of the Republican / Tea Party zealots has had no affect on the executioner. It is now Wednesday and the chorus of denial continues to swell.

Yet there is no way that they can know whether the constant vilification of the government by right-wing verbal arsonists had no affect on the decision of this guy to attempt to assassinate the congresswoman. He had not been systematically examined by psychiatrist, and if he has none of them has been privy to his record. Therefore any conclusion about his motives must be regarded as speculation. But reasonable speculations must be based on observable facts. First of all the fact that he is mentally deranged does not rule out the possibility that his decision wasn’t made in a vacuum, unaffected by the hateful anti-government rhetoric emanating from the kind of rightwing media that pollutes the air with hateful rhetoric in Arizona, or the celebration of guns and placing one’s opponent’s in the cross hairs of a gun in political ads!

As I have written over and over again ad-nauseum, it is precisely the mentally unstable lost souls who are often driven to commit atrocities as a result of these right wing harangues. This was true of Popolowski, Von Bruhn –who shot up the Holocaust Museum and killed the African American Guard. The guy who ran his plane into an IRS building must have also been unbalanced. Yet when we look at what these people had to say about why they did the things they did, the themes that emerge from their explanation are the same themes we hear in the diatribes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reiley and Glenn Beck! These themes are also echoed in the rhetoric of the Republican Party – especially the Tea Party crowd who is mesmerized by Sarah Palin! Yet we are expected to believe there is no connection? Why, because to conclude otherwise suggest that a leader of the Republican Party has blood on her hands, that her reckless rhetoric has incited mass murder?

During the 1960’s Congress passed a federal law against inciting to riot. Hubert “Rap” Brown, a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was actually convicted under this law after he made a speech in Cambridge Maryland and a riot later broke out! The 24/7 anti-government diatribes emanating from the verbal arsonist on the right, broadcast by FOX television and ABC radio is far more persuasive than a stump speech by Rap Brown.

For media people like Joe Scarboro to argue otherwise is the grossest hypocrisy. This is because his job depends on the belief that he can influence the choices of his audience. The whole business model of commercial media is based on this assumption. Commercial media does not exist for the edification or recreation of the audience. That is only a means to their real ends: the selling of advertising time! You cannot have it both ways – for instance you can’t have physics and meta-physics too – either these people can influence the choices of their listeners or not.

It is simply not believable that these media personalities can influence the choices of their listeners through intermittent 30 second commercials – for which companies spend millions to advertise their products – but the hours they spend indoctrinating their audience with impassioned diatribes about how the government – a body elected by the American people through a prescribed constitutional process mind you – is our enemy! These people routinely libel the President’s attempt to provide health care for those Americans who do not have access to medical care as the equivalent of Nazi death camps – which, along with making ignorance fashionable, has been the major contribution of Silly Sarah Palin to American political discourse.

Yet this disgraceful ditz has the unmitigated gall to appear on television as I write and accuse those of us who question her role in the Arizona massacre of “blood libel.” Well Sarah, blood libel is your thing! We are just pointing out the consequences of your amoral, racist, reckless approach to politics. It is as much because of her rhetoric and fetish for guns and tough talk that whites have been going out buying guns in record numbers since the election of Barack Obama as anything I can think of. But because she is both stupid and amoral, and a megalomaniac to boot, she actually has the chutzpa to try and cast herself as the victim. In so doing she is counting on her followers to remain the mindless sycophants they have always been….even in the face of bloody murder! As the Rastas would say: “Boobus Americanus to Ras!”

Silly Sarah

A Dangerous Megalomaniac and Unrepentant Moron!

Three days into the tragedy the outlines of the discourse as to its causes and ultimate meaning are emerging. The conservatives have selected their talking points and they are repeating them in lockstep like ideological lemmings. The party line is that there is absolutely no connection between this slaughter of innocents in Arizona and the rancorous rhetoric that has dominated Republican political speech since the election of President Obama. They are sticking to their story with the same kind of iron discipline the Grand Obstructionist Party has displayed in their attempts to block every legislative proposal offered by President Obama. And the Liberals appear thus far to agree.

The most spurious argument in a field overrun with dubious polemics is the contention that because the Assassin was reading both Carl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kempt” he could not possibly been motivated by the rancid rhetoric from the right that has so thoroughly polluted our political discourse and enraged many citizens to the point that some are using images of the President for target practice, and the Secret Service is receiving the highest volume of death threats in history. When arrayed against the facts however, this argument is quickly exposed for the dangerous sophistry that it is.

The reference to the assassin’s reading material is intended to expose the fact that he does not know the difference between Communism and Fascism; hence he does not know that the two philosophies are diametrically opposed. But that is the case with most of the people in the Tea Party movement, who routinely portrayed President Obama as a communist and as Adolph Hitler! Thus he is a typical Tea Party type, a clueless white boy lost in the blues!

If you combine this fundamental confusion about political philosophy with his irrational hatred of the Federal Government you have a classic Tea Party candidate. I defy any of the talking heads who have so confidently announced that the Arizona assassin was totally unaffected by the hate filled diatribes of the right, to present their evidence that me – and the much maligned Arizona Sheriff who agrees with my assessment – to present the evidence in support of their conclusions. Thus far I am totally unimpressed with their transparent apologia – which so far as I can see, is prompted by opportunism, delusion, denial and fear!

This explains why, in spite of the lack of any convincing evidence, the emerging consensus is that these are the actions of a single lunatic, there fore nothing useful can be learned about the danger to the stability of our society – i.e. our national security – from the manufacturing of anti-government hatred by the verbal arsonists in the Republican party and their shills in the media. This attitude is reflected in the polls measuring public opinion on the question of whether the inflammatory, violence laden, anti-government rhetoric played any role in the Arizona slaughter.

Fifty Seven percent of Americans said they thought it played no role at all. As strange as it seems to me, it’s not surprising in light of the recent election results, when millions of Americans voted against their Interests – read “On Our Dysfunctional Democracy” and “Triumph Of The Untutored Mob!” Predictably, the Palin apologist on the right are emboldened in their approach, and liberals in the media are cowed into going along with this absurd conclusion because their decisions are market driven.

The suits who run these networks – for profit lest we forget – do not want to offend their market just to tell an unpopular truth – even if real lives are at stake. After all they are businessmen not moral leaders. Thus it is profit not virtue that they are concerned with. Their behavior brings to mind an observation made by that old German gadfly Karl Marx “The capitalist will sell the hangman the rope to hang them with if they think they can make a profit!”

Glenn Beck Plays the Long Range Con

Although the rotund Rushbo is great at self-aggrandizement, he could take some lessons from the new kid on the block – Glenn Beck – a consummate con-man who has set new standards in the art of bullshitting the public. In a much hyped Washington rally with the nebulous objective of “Restoring America’s Honor”– held on the same date and venue of Dr. Martin Luther King’s great Speech at the historic March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom – this cubby little fellow with the squeaky voice, and shaky moral foundation, somehow managed to do the impossible: make vanity look like altruism in the eyes of his followers. It was a con from beginning to end.

The con began when he claimed not to have been aware of the fact that he called his rally on the same date as the historic “March on Washington” nearly a half century ago, or that the venue he chose for his shallow diatribe was the very same venue where Dr. King presented the oration that has been voted the greatest speech in American history by a panel of distinguished scholars. My granddaddy George had a saying that expresses my feelings exactly: “That Boy’s a liar and the truth ain’t in him!”

Beck piggybacked off and exploited our soldiers sacrifices in the cheesiest way: by pretending to honor them while basking in their reflected glory. That’s really playing to the cheap seats! Everyone who cares about this issue knows that if Beck were really concerned about the vets he would be supporting our First Lady Michel Obama’s admirable efforts on behalf of military families.

Although I am inclined to be contemptuous of this delusional far right confederacy of dunces – who routinely vote against their own interest, scoff at the public interests while protecting the privileges of the Plutocrats, and get their rocks off mis-quoting the Bible spouting nonsense as constitutional dogma – I ended up actually feeling sorry for many of them. They had journeyed to Washington earnestly seeking answers to the myriad crisis’ that plague their lives…but found only a pompous little poseur spouting hot air.

I have previously described the Tea Party crowd as a motley collection of sad sacks, misfits, deluded white supremacists, misanthropes, vulgar opportunist, religeous fanatics and lost souls looking for hope in all the wrong places – with an obsequious self-loathing Negro lickspittle here and there. Nothing that happened on Saturday changed that opinion. It goes without saying that Republican political opportunists are everywhere in the mix, stirring up the pot, trying to gain personal and party support. We’ll see how that work’s out for them.

Thus far it looks like the Grand Obstructionist Party has made a Faustian bargain with the Tea Party mob and the Devil has come to claim their souls. Just look at how the Tea Party – directed by the lunatic right’s idea of a militant feminist intellectual, Sarah Palin – are knocking off the Republican establishment’s candidates, right and further right, with straight up space cadets. The most spectacular example of this is the apparent upset in the Republican primary in Alaska.

As I write the Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller, is leading the sitting Republican Senator Lisa McCulsky by 1500 votes. And you have to listen to what Mr. Miller believes to understand how Alaskans would have to be even dumber than I think – and since they voted Sarah Palin Governor, given what I’ve written about her, you can imagine how dumb I think they are! – to vote for this guy to represent them in the Senate.

The curious thing about Mr. Miller is that in spite of his excellent education he still talks as crazy as Palin, and they both talk like fools. I will have more to say about Mr. Miller in a forthcoming commentary on the new radical constitutionalists in the south in the Republican Party. But one observation will suffice here: Based on Miller’s public comments about the nature of Federalism and the evolution of the US Constitution, he is either an ignoramus or a charlatan. Should he win this primary, and I hope to God he does, the Democrats stand a fabulous chance of winning a seat that has been held by the McCulsky family, who are yellow dog Republicans, for over thirty years!

Furthermore, I can envision no scenario where there will be enough morons in the state of Nevada to elect Sharon Engle, hence the Republicans will lose a Senate seat that the establishment’s candidate was predicted to win. Notwithstanding how backwards and racist many white folks are in Kentucky – a state that, for most of it’s history, either enslaved black people or subjected them to legal caste oppression, which treated our skin color as a crime – I still cannot believe they will elect a cluless political Neanderthal like Rand Paul.

Paul is the best example why people with a broad liberal, i.e. humanist, education are better suited to the leadership of society than narrow minded technocrats, no matter how clever they are. Although political science is a real discipline in the academy – and an important one too– the practice of politics and governing is a fine art! And art is the province of the humanities!

If anything was clarified by this rally, it is that Glenn Beck’s real agenda is to replace Oprah as the #1 television talk show in America and become the biggest mogul in the media! And he intends to use this disillusioned and untutored mob to achieve it. Looking like the little poot butt boy who never got the girl, who was smacked upside the head and had his lunch money taken by school yard bullies, Glennie Boy reminds me of a slimmer version the old character Jackie Gleason used to play: “The Poor Soul.” Except in this episode the poor soul is getting his revenge against all who refused to recognize his uniqueness. He’s having a horse laugh at all of our expense – and he’s laughing all the way to the bank!

Although he is shamefully untutored in subjects like sociology, foreign affairs, political science and history – things you need to know something about in order to advance grand speculations about the direction our complex post-industrial society should take. Listening to his “speech” I fairly quickly came to two conclusions: Beck is a megalomaniacal numbskull, a deluded frog who fancies himself a prince. And his followers are the sad silly mob I thought they were!

Taking some of the grand themes in American history, Beck rambled on ad-nauseum – confusing his metaphors, posturing false analogies, profaning sacred texts, boring us with hackneyed clichés, and trying his best to play us for fools. Since his audience was basically the same crowd that turned up at the Republican National Convention I have no doubt that his message – whatever it was – resonated with most of them.

I say this with some certainty because during the convention the reporters and producers at WBAI FM took to the streets with our tape recorders and interviewed them en masse. We decided to just ask the pertinent questions and allow them to express themselves freely. No editorial excoriating them, regardless of how scurrilous, could equal the indictment they gave of themselves.

It is fair, I think, to conclude that this may well have been the dumbest group of people ever assembled any where in the world to choose a candidate who would govern a great nation. Hence although Beck went over like a lead balloon with me, I could tell from the ecstatic stares and spacey smiles on their pasty faces that he was uplifting the spirits of many in this cluless mob.

Glennie was getting off on it too. Buoyed by the good vibes emanating from the crowd, he actually started to believe he had skills as an orator – based on some of the things he said before the rally; perhaps he thought he was channeling Dr. King! Such is the feeling of omnipotence that the roar of the crowd can inspire in little men with deep seated feelings of impotence and self loathing.

This is what Whoopi Exposed about his character when he made the mistake of going on The View, after having lied about something or the other. Whoopi looked Glennie straight in the eyes and called him a “Lying sack of spit!” and Glennie bitched up on the spot! He looked like he wanted to jump up and run because Whoopi acted like if he said the wrong thing she just might break her foot off in his posterior.

**************

Although I tend to stay away from pop-psychology, since there are others who are much better qualified to venture speculations about human character and personality. But the thoughtful observer, who understands something about how personalities are molded, need not have studied Dr. Freud to recognize that this is a little man who is having his big moment. It is enough to have read Wilhelm Reich’s “Listen Little Man” and “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” in order to have a good idea what was going on here.

However I strongly suspect that Beck cares not a fig for the goals of the Tea party buffoons or the Republican Party hucksters. And he has said as much; he has occasionally reminded people that he is an “entertainer” and his principal concern is the success of his show – Rush has said the same thing. Although he has employed racist innuendo and slander to advance his agenda – which is the means by which the Republicans mobilized white resentment into a political movement that converted the south from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican – I don’t think Beck gives anymore of a good goddam about race than he does about politics.

That’s why he declared that the rally was not about politics and expressly forbade political signs. And there were no establishment Republicans on the bill. This also explains how Beck could allow Martin Luther King’s niece to speak without a vetted script. And she shocked many of the rednecks in the crowd with her no holds barred denunciation of racism in America. The enthusiastic applause that greeted her introduction quickly subsided when she began to speak on an issue the Republican right is built upon denying. As a speaker she was mediocre alas, and her overall message was muddled without a clear direction.

Her attempt to reiterate Dr. King’s famous refrain:”I have a dream” was embarrassing. I could not escape the feeling that she is not very bright and that her main reason for appearing at this sad rally was self-promotion. After all, her cousins are certainly cashing in on the King Legacy, and her father, A.D. King, walked with his famous brother Martin….until he turned up dead in a swimming pool, with nasty rumors swirling around that he had gotten drunk, fallen in, and drowned.

But in the matter of self promotion she was typical of all who spoke at this media contrived talkfest. However she is a rank amateur compared to the grand Meisterss of shameless self-promotion, Silly Sarah, whose great contribution to American political discourse thus far is to make ignorance fashionable. The whole event, with very little teweaking, was described perfectly by Shakespeare in Act 5, scene 5, 19–28 of MacBeth: They were but walking shadows, poor players, That struts and frets their hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It was a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Recently Bill O’Reily charged that critiques of Republican women by democrats are motivated by envy, because their women are hot and democrat women ain’t squat. Of course, at the top of his list is Sarah Palin, who has been known to inspire wet dreams in certain Republican ideologues. Rush Limbaugh for instance, openly panted over her and declared her a “hot babe.” As a lifelong Democrat and pugnacious pundit I naturally felt compelled to respond to Mr. O’Reily’s hyperbole.

From the moment she burst upon the national scene — bold, brazen, boisterous and wearing a silly smile – Sarah Palin sometimes reminded me of a plumper version of Ellie Mae Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies, and other times she seemed a reincarnation of Miss Kitty, the cat house madam from the old television series “Gun Smoke,” which was wildly popular during the 1950’s when I came of age. She had the style of a sporting lady trying to turn a trick, they way she constantly batted her eyes and conjured fake smiles as she seduced her audiences. The main difference between Silly sarah and Miss Kitty is the latter was a tart with a heart and the former seems to have ice water in her veins, circulated by a cast iron pump. And after listening to her acceptance speech when John McCain chose her as his Vice Presidential running mate, she immediately replaced Danford C. Quayle as the dumbest person to ever hold that position!

Although I had already dismissed John McCain as an unprincipled and dangerous opportunist whose soul was for sale if the proper Faustian bargain presented itself, his selection of Silly Sarah to occupy an office which would place her a heartbeat away from the presidency assured me that he would readily place the fate of the nation in peril if it served his thirst for power. The more I listened to Sarah talk, the more unimpressed I became. And by the time she uttered her last words I had dubbed her “The Alaskan Barbarian.”

I thought Sarah’s selection not only imperiled the national security should McCain be elected President, but it was an insult to American women. It was as if he had looked past the legions of brilliant and capable women in the US and chosen Lucy Ricardo to lead the nation from the Oval office should he meet an untimely demise. Given the fact that big John is a grizzled old fart who looks like he is hanging over hell’s fire by an eyelash, and could slip away at anytime, the possibility of having this empty headed, gun totin, moose hunting, motor mouth shrew in charge of the nation’s affairs was a real probability. The idea of Sarah conducting US diplomacy was harrowing, and the possibility of her gaining command of our vast nuclear arsenal was terrifying.

As we got to know her better Sarah proved to be even dumber that I’d first suspected. While she was great at spinning back woods yarns about the joys of moose stew, and celebrating her white “part Eskimo” husband’s fishing and sledding skills, it quickly became all too obvious that she was totally unprepared for high office. Her sole qualifications seemed to be that she was a tenacious basketball player at Wasilla High – earning the nick name “Sarah Barracuda” – who rose to become Mayor of her home town – which had a population smaller than that which I can see outside my window, and the governor of a state with a budget smaller than New York City.

This failed beauty queen not only knew very little about the world outside of the frozen tundra of Alaska – she actually thought the fact that she could see Russia from Alaska on a clear day made her qualified to handle foreign affairs – but felt herself under attack when Katie Couric asked what publications she read. And when she was asked to explain her position on the “Bush Doctrine” by Charlie Gibson on ABC News she thought it was a carefully laid trap designed to embarrass her with “gotcha” questions. The routine functions of the workaday press seemed like vicious assaults to this backwoods bumpkin, who was obviously accustomed to spouting all manner of fact free nonsense without challenge.

Sarah’s selection to campaign for the second highest office in this great country was scandal enough in itself, but in order to justify their choice Republican Party spokesmen began to attack Barack Obama’s Ivy League education – which amounted to a celebration of ignorance! They actually argued that Sarah Palin’s belated degree in journalism from Iowa State, fortified by her mother wit and so-called “executive experience” was better preparation for the Presidency than Barack’s education at Columbia University and Harvard Law, plus time spent dealing with international issues in the Senate.

For a nation whose student’s placed at the bottom in international science and math competitions this was a disastrous development. The last thing we need is to stigmatize an Ivy League education; the one arena where our students are unquestionably being prepared to compete with the world’s best. Yet once the GOP saw that this line of argument worked, as Sarah’s appearances attracted large and howling mobs from among the racist and untutored Republican “base” – check out her speech in Strongsville Ohio on You Tube – who felt that she was one of them, the GOP decided that that promoting mindless motor mouths was a good strategy.

Watching those sad, deluded, enraged and confused white racists who comprise the Republican base, and the far right mavericks in the “Tea Party” movement, go bonkers over Sarah the Grand Obstructionist Party decided to stick with her no matter what. Hence when her unmarried teenage daughter popped up pregnant for a loquacious thug while Sarah was running around preaching abstinence to everyone else’s daughter and opposing the teaching of sex education in the schools, they gave her a pass and chose to praise her daughter for not having an abortion.

Everybody knows that had this been Barack Obama’s daughter we would have heard endless self-righteous preachment about the moral depravity of the black community from these shameless hypocrites. Not even Sarah’s neglect of her new born infant – who is handicapped and thus needs the attention of his mother even more than the average infant – inspired criticism from the “family first” bible thumping Christian Right.

And everyone pretended not to notice that Sarah and her teenage daughter were having babies around the same time, which is real low life trailer park trash stuff. And when she quit her post as Governor of Alaska and walked away because she could make more money hustling on her celebrity, without the headaches of governing or dealing with several corruption investigations, she was not only forgiven by her acolytes among the Republican faithful, but the “Tea Party Patriots” – who bill themselves as a grass roots movement – gladly pay her up to $100, 000 a speech!

Thus no one symbolizes the militant ignorance, crass opportunism, amoral hypocrisy, contempt for the poor, vulgar materialism and avarice of the Republican Party better than Sarah Palin. Yet because she is able to rouse the untutored rabble that the country club elite – the real princes and powers of the Republican Party – cannot reach but can’t win without, even the GOP intelligentsia hesitates to criticize her publicly. Thus by default, Silly Sarah has become the model for female politicians in Republican politics. Hence the string of hysterical ding bats who are increasingly defining the public face of the party.

This explains the growing prominence of Congresswoman Michele Bachman from Minnesota, who as near as I can tell is even crazier than the Alaskan Barbarian. This is a sitting United States Congress Woman who says she wants her constituents “armed and dangerous!” And after this kind of treasonous talk she says the media should examine members of Congress to determine who holds “anti-American” views! Since she went to college and holds advanced degrees in law, Ms. Bachman is either suffering from some species of paranoia or she is bull shitting the ignorant racist rabble that supports her.

Mad Michelle

A True Space Cadet!

If she is sane – which is not at all certain – surely the Congresswoman must know that her attitude and ideas are un-American. The American way, as spelled out in the US Constitution she purports to revere, calls for the holding of free and fair elections in which we select our leaders by secret ballot. That’s precisely how President Obama and the Democrats came to power. But rather than honor the constitutional process Megalomaniacal Michelle is calling for the overthrow of the government by armed force because she didn’t get her way.

As I write she is denouncing the President for attending the G-20 economic summit, accusing him of conspiring with foreigners to lead America into “a world economy;” because in her view this would lead to ”a world government,” which would hitch the fate of the US with that of “Zimbabwe.” Either she is willfully cutting the fool to dupe her fans, or she is too stupid to understand that the Republicans have been the main promoters of globalization.

The Republican elite represent the investor class, and they will invest their money anywhere. All they care about is the rate of return. Never has Karl Marx’s observation that “the workers are nationalists, the bourgeoisie are internationalists” rung truer. The investor class routinely moves capital all over the globe, driven only by the profit motive, without consideration for the national interest. That’s why I argue that either Ms. Bachman doesn’t have a clue how things work or she is perpetuating a fraud on her constituents.

It is hard to know what’s what with this woman because she has a history of saying so many really stupid things. For instance she attributed the onset of the Great Depression to Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt signing the “Hoot Smalley Act.” Aside from the fact that her theory of historical causation is nonsense, it was the Smoot Halley Act and it was signed by Republican President Herbert Hoover, who was in office when the Depression started!

Congresswoman Bachman has also declared global warming a fraud, arguing that carbon monoxide cannot be harmful “because its natural.” She also warned that President Obama was secretly establishing communist type “re-education camps” for American youths. And when she is not worrying about the President interning her children she agonizes about the “gays” seducing them. And lest we forget, this is no fringe group fanatic but a Republican member of Congress! This woman is an embarrassment; I am ashamed that such a scatter brain blunder buss could actually sit in the greatest parliament in the world. And what it tells us about the values and intelligence of her Minnesota constituents is frightening.

Sharron Angle

Air Head From another Planet

Just when you think you have heard all the lunatic stories from these vicious airhead Republican broads along comes Sharon Angle from Nevada. The first time I saw Sad Sack Sharon, she was literally running from a local reporter who was trying to question her on public positions she had taken while running in the Republican primary to become their candidate for the US Senate against Majority leader Harry Reed. Of course she got the idea that the mainstream press is a dangerous enemy to be avoided due to the briefings she received from former Republican Congressman turned rightwing propagandist and “Tea Party” organizer Dick Armey.

Devious Dick had attempted to explain Rand Paul’s problems away by saying he should never have allowed himself to be interviewed by Dr. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. But he did clueless Sharon a serious disservice by neglecting to tell her that the real reason for his problems is that he talks like a damn fool. Had he told her this she might have changed her tune earlier, although she has said so many absurd things on the record I doubt that she could have successfully expunged the record. But since she is about as deep as a dry river bed, keeping her away from serious reporters is still their best bet.

As outrageous as it is for a candidate to attempt to run for the US Congress – and in Palin’s case the Vice Presidency – without ever granting an interview to a major news organization, it is becoming standard operating procedure for the dopes the Republicans are putting up as candidates for high office. And when this kind of subterfuge comes from people who claim to love the US Constitution and revere our democratic electoral process it is the most shameless sort of hypocrisy – nothing is sacred to this crowd but wealth and power.

Yet when you hear the kinds of things these people are saying, what they actually stand for, it’s no wonder that the Republicans want to hide them from the general public. And none are more frightening than the Republican women. That’s why right-wing propagandists like Rush and Billy would rather talk about their looks rather than their ideas. Alas, Republican women like Liz Cheney, one of the smartest and most vicious in the pack, looks like Denny Dimwit so she’s the odd gal out. And so is that anorexic witch Crazy Annie Coulter, although Charming Billy thinks she’s a fox! Crazy Annie and her cut buddy, WABC air head Lurid Laura Ingram, are interesting specimens of the screaming reactionary Republican banshee, I shall not critique them here because I have done that elsewhere on this blog. Just look them up in the search engine.

Sharron Angle doesn’t qualify for Rush and Bill’s “Hot Babes” list either. She is not only an old booga bear but also rip roaring mad to boot. Among the things she was advocating before she lucked up and won the Nevada Republican primary for the Senate is abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. She would also scrap the Social Security program and gamble the funds on the stock market. She is opposed to unemployment insurance because she believes unemployment benefits are too generous and promotes laziness in the working class! It is no wonder she wants to prevent the general electorate from discovering these long and sincerely held views.

By trying to hide people like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, who appears to be the dumbest of the pack, the GOP and their Tea Party cohorts are attempting to perpetrate a fraud on the electorate by confining appearances of their whacko candidates to the far right media circuit. Even as I write, Ms. Angle is trying to sue the campaign of Senator Harry Reed for reposting the political positions that she recently removed from her website. She is scrambling to white wash her lunatic views now that she has discovered the rest of the country outside of the rightwing bubble views them as ridiculous. It always seems to surprise them that Rush, Sean, Bill and Glenn don’t speak for most Americans.

Gun Freak: Pamela Gorman

Republican candidate for Congress in Arizona

Dynomite!

Crazy Annie Coulter and her Main Man J. J. Walker

A Note on Bill and Other Slobbering Republican Lechers

Bill O’Reily, the Irish Catholic motor mouth at FOX who does nothing but Spin in the “No Spin Zone,” including buying off a female subordinate who filed sexual harassment charges, is the last of the slobbering Republican lechers to Join Rush Limbaugh in charging Democrats with being jealous of the beauty of Republican women. Recently he made a list of the “hot babes” in the Republican ranks. I think it is a sign of their contempt for women that they choose to make an issue of their looks rather than their intelligence – although given the unremitting stupidity of Republican women it is easy to see why.

Bill has the mindset of a sexual harasser; the kind of predatory male boss who pays far more attention to women workers butts than their brains. It is just one more example of their refusal to behave like responsible adults and relate to female colleagues as equals. It is hard to tell whether it is stupidity or arrogance that compels a man who has already survived a sexual harassment scandal to offer such a sexist analysis. For these are not beauty pageant contestants that we are considering here, but leaders of the most powerful nation in the world; a nation that is in a protracted crisis alas.

Since he has made such an issue of this, and I am a Yellow Dog Democrat – which means that I would vote for a yellow dog before I’d cast my ballot for any Republican – I feel that I must respond to Billy Boy’s charges of Democrat envy lest I too be labeled a jealous hater. Plus, on the real side, the player in me bristles at the thought of a doopus Big Bird looking square like Bill trying to chump me off. So in my defense I’d like to submit my idea of a beautiful white woman – who also happens to be a world class brainac – which will make it plain why I am unimpressed by that white trash debutante Silly Sarah Palin, and the rest of those pasty faced Republican air heads that so impresses poot butts like Bill and Rush!

Over the weekend the Republicans held a conference in the Washington suburbs to assess their losses in the recent elections and devise a plan that will return them to power in the future. The vehicle they created to usher them back into power is “The Council for a New America,” a freshly minted association of confused and abused Republicans who have come together with the avowed aim of charting a new course for the Grand Old Party. Yet listening to some of the luminaries of the CNA on the Sunday morning talkies, I get the impression that they are simply pouring old wine into new bottles.

Perhaps that explains why their rhetoric of revival fails to include a candid analysis of how they lost Washington in the first place. As near as I could tell listening to Mitt Romney and Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor – princes and powers of the new organization – they haven’t a clue what went down, and understand even less about what it will take to get back in the drivers seat.

Nothing demonstrates Republican confusion more convincingly than their cavalier, even contemptuous, responses to the defection of Senator Arlen Specter, and the candid critiques of young Megan McCain – who represents a demographic the Republican’s must win in order to take back the national government. At present the party is shrinking so fast under their present ideology that we may yet witness the Republicans return to the position of disdain and suspicion with which everybody I knew viewed them when I was a boy.

For millions of Americans at that time the GOP was indelibly associated with the onset of the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” that delivered them from economic chaos and mass misery was a gift of the Democrats; the party that had also conducted a world war successfully. It’s that vibe of suspicion and disdain toward the GOP from back in the day that the Democrats should work to resurrect. And from the look of things they’re going to have plenty of Republican assistance; for they are rapidly producing their own grave diggers.

The public pronouncements of the two men who are widely regarded as top presidential prospects, Mitt and Eric, contained heavy does of hubris and delusion. Mitt attributed Barack’s spectacular victory and the Democratic conquest of Congress to a fickle fate: the Republicans were “caught holding an economic hot potato” he says; while Barack was giving some great speeches railing against them. And Eric thinks the key to Barack’s victory is his internet savvy. In other words it was the medium, not the message.

A conventional minded captain of Industry, whose passionate devotion to Mormonism – a fantastic tale even when measured against the Arabian Nights – Mitt Romney hasn’t a clue what concerns average Americans – who include the working and middle classes…. and poor people too. And Eric Cantor is captive to the southern base of the Republican Party: a band of militant morons whose world view is shaped by endless hours of listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. This assures that Cantor will pay dearly if he dares to suggest reasonable ideas which might appeal to the majority of Americans.

A Verbose Screwball!

And Moose Hunting Barbarian!

Neither Eric nor the Mittster acknowledged that their Party’s fall from grace had any relationship to the fact that the Bushmen’s obsession with securing a military advantage over a prostrate Russia encouraged a clueless Republican President to ignore warnings from the CIA and FBI that Islamic Jihadists were planning to crash planes into American skyscrapers. And with their support a Republican president had invaded a non-offending country and started a three trillion dollar war; squandered a multi-billion dollar budget surplus bequeathed to him by his democratic predecessor; spied on millions of innocent American citizens and disgraced the honor of our nation by instituting torture as a policy of the US government! Listening to these guys prattle on about tax cuts, smaller government and “A strong national defense” one wondered just where their heads were at.

A conventional minded captain of Industry, whose passionate devotion to Mormonism – a fantastic tale even when measured against the Arabian Nights – Mitt Romney hasn’t a clue what concerns average Americans – who include the working and middle classes…. and poor people too. And Eric Cantor is captive to the southern base of the Republican Party: a band of militant morons whose world view is shaped by endless hours of listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. This assures that Cantor will pay dearly if he dares to suggest reasonable ideas which might appeal to the majority of Americans.

There was no suggestion that these guys understood the political realities of America today. And they represent the reasonable side of contemporary Republicanism; the Alaskan Barbarian Sarah Palin and the rotund Rushbo represents the alternative. However I think it a safe bet that should the Republicans select either of these Great White Dopes as the Party standard bearer, in the vain hope of defeating Barack Obama, it will be a sure sign they have abandoned rational decision making altogether and retreated into fantasy.